Video: Working with the toolbar and the shortcut bar

One of the most popular modules in Drupal's history is called Administration Menu. It's a fairly simple module. It's just a strip of pop down menus at the top of the screen, but it makes site management a lot easier for administrators. Drupal 7 successfully incorporated that module's main feature as the toolbar, which you see at the top of every page in this black area. You'll only see it though if you have permission to see it and of course as the site administrator, we can see it ourselves. You can change that permission of course in Permissions.

In Drupal 7 New Features, author Tom Geller demonstrates changes to the Drupal 7 administrative interface and other enhancements that have come out of its three-year development period. This course covers its simplified installation process, new themes that will help kick-start design projects, the customizable shortcut bar that puts often-used commands in easy reach, update procedures that leverage its browser-based interface, and a new way of defining fields to create complex content types without additional modules.

Working with the toolbar and the shortcut bar

One of the most popular modules in Drupal's history is calledAdministration Menu.It's a fairly simple module.It's just a strip of pop down menus at the top of the screen, but it makes sitemanagement a lot easier for administrators.Drupal 7 successfully incorporated that module's main feature as the toolbar,which you see at the top of every page in this black area.You'll only see it though if you have permission to see it and of course as thesite administrator, we can see it ourselves.You can change that permission of course in Permissions.

Just below that is the shortcut bar, this gray area right here. Technically theshortcut bar is actually part of the toolbar, so everyone who can see thetoolbar can also see the shortcut bar.The difference between the two is that the links in the toolbar are frozen in place.They're Drupal's main clickable interface and you can't change it.It's basically the Administer menu from Drupal 6, but made horizontal and pretty.The shortcut bar on the other hand, this gray area, can be made to show links toany part of your site that you like and I'll show you how.We don't really have to go over how the toolbar works because we've been usingit this whole course.

You click on it and it gives you the administrative part that you need.And then you close out the administrative overface if necessary.Two parts we haven't shown are up here to the right.Log Out I don't think we need to discuss at all.And then this brings you to your user account just like so. One other part of thetoolbar and shortcut bar is this little arrow here which you can use to closethe shortcut bar, so it sort of folds up underneath the toolbar.So that's the toolbar.Now let's move onto the shortcut bar.It starts out with just two links in it, Add content and Find content, but youcan add things and remove things as you like, and they're basically twodifferent ways to do that.

One is really convenient once you know where it is and I'll show you that bygoing to pretty much any administrative page.Let's say Appearance.Now, you see this little plus next to Appearance. As we hover our cursor over it,we see Add to Default shortcuts.I'll click it and there it is.Now, wherever we are in the site, we are on the Configuration page, it doesn'treally matter. The Dashboard.If we want to get to that page all we have to do is click Appearance.And there we go. Once we're there we can remove it from the shortcut bar byclicking on what's now a minus sign. You click it, say yes I do want to remove it, and it's gone.

The other way to add and remove things from the shortcut bar takes a little bitmore digging, but it's a lot more flexible.You can see that at the end of the shortcut bar here, Edit shortcuts.And before I go there I'm just going to take a note here. This is atadmin/appearance and I'll actually copy that URL.Now, I'll go to Edit shortcuts, and say yes I'd like to add a shortcut.I'll call it Appearance.And down here I'll say this is where I want it to go and Save.There it is and once again, when I click it that's where I go. So far so good.

Now, things get a little bit tricky.We've been editing a single shortcut bar.Every user with permission to see the toolbar will see that same one, which iscalled default, but you can actually create as many shortcut bars as you want.That's useful if you have people on your team performing different tasks. You cangive each group it's own shortcut bar.For example, a news editor might have one that says Post news articles, while acommunity manager shortcut bar it might have one that says Add member.And I'll show you how to do that by going up to Configuration and scroll down to Shortcuts.

I'm going to create a shortcut bar called editor by clicking there and sayingEditor and Create new set.Now just to show you, I'm going to go back to Configuration and Shortcuts and wesee we have Default and Editor.You can delete the editor set, but you can't delete the default set. That's thebasic one which again everyone sees unless you tell them otherwise.I'm going to go back and add another shortcut. I'll go up to let's sayContent > Add new content > Article.And as you expect, I have this plus sign up here.If I click it, it goes to the default shortcuts and we see it up here next to Appearance.

If we go back to Configuration and Shortcuts, we can actually list the links in each of them.We haven't changed our editor shortcut set yet.So you might be asking how can I actually change that editor shortcut set?Well, I'll show you. You do it in the user account.To do that I go up and click on my own account, which is admin, and I have thisnew tab here called Shortcuts.When I click on that, I can select which shortcut set I want to use or Ican create a new one.I'm going to switch over to Editor and say Change set.

Great, I'm now using the Editor shortcut set.When I close out this window,now when I go to Configuration and let's just say Account Settings, and I add one here,now it says Add to Editor shortcuts.So as you can see you can have multiple sets if you like one again for newseditors and other for community managers and so forth.Now, when you create a new user, they get the default shortcuts to start off.As someone with administrator privileges, you can change which shortcuts theyget by going to that person's user page, just as you did on your own page.

The way you would do that is you would go to People and then you go down andedit the person just as you normally would.You can also grant individual users permission to decide what shortcut bars they want to use.And the way you do that is by going to People, click on Permissions, and then scroll down.There is actually a shortcut section down here where you can, as you say,Select any shortcut set.I could give that, for example, to every authenticated user if I wanted, but fornow I'll just go back Home.These two bars, the toolbar and shortcut, bar are really great boons to people whoget around by pointing and clicking.

They don't replace every function of that Administration Menu module whichI mentioned earlier.And you can still get it at Drupal.org/project/admin_menu.The most notable difference in Administration Menu is that it has pop-out menus.So when you move your mouse up here instead of just seeing Appearance or Peopleyou would actually see all of the sub things underneath that.That's actually very useful if you like to point and click.Some people dislike this toolbar and shortcut bar altogether because theythink it's a distraction.

Well, fortunately just like the administrative overlay, you can turn it off.You go Modules scroll down to Toolbar and you would check this box and then Saveconfiguration and it would be turned off entirely.

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